Every major AI,
explained
From autonomous agents and agentic coding models to the frontier chatbots: in-depth guides to what each AI is, what it's good for, how to use it, and what it costs. Read them right here, no email required.
Which AI should you use?
A practical comparison of the major AI assistants and model families: the frontier chatbots (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok), the answer engines and Copilots, and the open-weight and emerging models (Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and more). What each is best at, what they cost, and how to choose.
Compare them all →Agentic AI
Agents, platforms & agentic models
The systems that do not just answer but act: autonomous agents, agent platforms, and the models built to plan, use tools, and edit across whole codebases.
DeepSeek
A Chinese lab whose open-weight models, especially the R1 reasoning model, matched frontier quality at a fraction of the cost, and reset expectations for AI pricing.
Read the guide →Alibaba · 8 minQwen
Alibaba's open-weight model family, one of the broadest and most-downloaded, spanning tiny on-device models to large multimodal and coding variants.
Read the guide →GitHub / Microsoft · 8 minGitHub Copilot
The AI pair programmer built into your editor, offering inline code completion, chat about your repo, and an agent mode across VS Code, JetBrains, and GitHub.
Read the guide →Moonshot AI (China) · 8 minKimi
Moonshot AI's assistant, known for very long context and, with the open-weight Kimi K2 model, strong agentic and coding ability at low cost.
Read the guide →MiniMax (China) · 7 minMiniMax
A Chinese lab whose models pair very long context with strong audio and video generation, with an open-weight text model you can self-host.
Read the guide →Zhipu AI (China) · 8 minGLM (Z.ai)
Zhipu AI's open-weight GLM family, now led by the agentic coding model GLM-5.2: a permissively licensed, self-hostable model built for long-horizon, repository-scale software engineering.
Read the guide →Sakana AI (Japan) · 7 minSakana Fugu
Sakana AI's multi-agent orchestration system, delivered as a single API that assembles and coordinates many models to run complex, multi-step tasks autonomously.
Read the guide →Cognition AI · 7 minDevin
Cognition AI's autonomous software engineer: an agent that plans and ships code in its own cloud environment, with a shell, editor, and browser, and reports back like a teammate.
Read the guide →Manus AI · 6 minManus
A general autonomous agent that runs multi-step tasks in the cloud on its own, from research and data work to building simple sites and documents, and hands you the finished result.
Read the guide →Genspark AI · 6 minGenspark
A super agent that plans a task and uses a toolbox of its own, from web search and document generation to slides, sheets, and even automated phone calls, to deliver a finished result.
Read the guide →Salesforce · 7 minSalesforce Agentforce
Salesforce's platform for building and deploying autonomous agents grounded in your CRM data, with a reasoning engine, guardrails, and consumption-based pricing for the enterprise.
Read the guide →Google · 6 minGoogle Jules
Google's asynchronous coding agent: powered by Gemini, it clones your repository into a cloud machine, works on a task on its own, and opens a pull request for review.
Read the guide →Amazon · 6 minAmazon Nova Act
Amazon's model and SDK for building reliable agents that take actions in a web browser, aimed at breaking complex workflows into small, dependable steps developers can compose.
Read the guide →Mistral AI · 6 minDevstral
Mistral's open-weight coding model built for agentic software engineering: tuned to run inside agent harnesses, edit across files, and resolve real GitHub issues, with weights you can self-host.
Read the guide →Anysphere · 6 minCursor
An AI-native code editor from Anysphere: a familiar editor with deep AI built in, from inline completion to an agent mode that plans and edits across your whole project.
Read the guide →Replit · 6 minReplit Agent
An agent that builds and deploys a working app from a plain-language prompt, inside Replit's cloud environment, so you can go from idea to a live URL without managing setup.
Read the guide →All Hands AI · 6 minOpenHands
An open-source autonomous software-development agent from All Hands AI: it runs in a sandboxed environment with a terminal, editor, and browser, and you can self-host it or use the hosted cloud.
Read the guide →OpenAI · 6 minChatGPT Agent
OpenAI's agentic mode inside ChatGPT: given a goal, it works in its own virtual computer, browsing the web and using tools to carry out multi-step tasks and return a finished result.
Read the guide →The wider landscape
Every other major model
Claude
Anthropic's assistant, known for careful reasoning, strong writing, and the best end-to-end coding experience of the major chatbots.
Read the guide →OpenAI · 9 minChatGPT
OpenAI's assistant and the most widely used chatbot, a generalist with the broadest feature set: voice, image generation, web browsing, data analysis, and custom GPTs.
Read the guide →Google · 8 minGemini
Google's AI assistant, natively multimodal, with the largest context window of the major models and deep integration across Search, Workspace, and Android.
Read the guide →xAI · 7 minGrok
xAI's assistant, built into X (formerly Twitter), fast, willing to be blunt, and uniquely tied to real-time social data.
Read the guide →Mistral AI · 8 minMistral
A European AI lab known for strong open-weight models you can self-host, plus Le Chat, a fast assistant with a real data-control story.
Read the guide →Perplexity AI · 7 minPerplexity
An AI answer engine: ask a question, get a direct answer written from a live web search, with numbered citations to every source.
Read the guide →Meta · 8 minLlama
Meta's open-weight model family, the most widely downloaded foundation for self-hosted and on-device AI, free to run and fine-tune under a community license.
Read the guide →Microsoft · 8 minMicrosoft Copilot
Microsoft's assistant, embedded across Windows, Microsoft 365, and Edge, built on OpenAI's models and grounded in your organization's own work data.
Read the guide →Cohere (Canada) · 7 minCohere Command
Cohere's enterprise model family, built for retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and multilingual work, with private deployment inside your own cloud.
Read the guide →Baidu (China) · 7 minErnie
Baidu's model family and assistant, one of China's most established, with strong Chinese-language and multimodal ability and an open-weight ERNIE 4.5 release.
Read the guide →ByteDance (China) · 7 minDoubao
ByteDance's assistant and model family, one of China's most used, known for very low-cost API pricing through Volcano Engine and strong multimodal features.
Read the guide →Amazon · 7 minAmazon Nova
Amazon's own foundation models, served through AWS Bedrock and tuned for cost-efficiency, with text, image, and video variants for builders on AWS.
Read the guide →AI21 Labs (Israel) · 7 minJamba
AI21 Labs' open-weight model family, built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture for efficient, very long-context work.
Read the guide →IBM · 7 minGranite
IBM's family of open, Apache-licensed enterprise models, focused on efficient sizes, code, and governance for business and regulated use.
Read the guide →TII (UAE) · 7 minFalcon
The open-weight model family from the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, an early open-model leader with permissive licensing and self-hostable sizes.
Read the guide →Put agentic AI into production
Knowing the models is step one. SDEN is your agentic engineering partner: we audit where agents fit, then build and run them with evaluation, guardrails, and governance, not demo-day prompts.
See how we engineer agents →